Ecuador: Survivor sues after claiming liner ignored distress calls

Adrian Mr Vazquez saw two friends die from dehydration and heat stroke aboard their stricken fishing boat as it bobbed around the Pacific Ocean after its engine failed.

In a lawsuit filed in Florida, Mr Mr Vazquez, 18, claims that the captain of the Star Princess, which was en route from Ecuador to Costa Rica, breached maritime law by failing to render assistance.

He says passengers aboard the vessel spotted them in distress on 10 March and alerted crew members, but that he and his companions were left to watch in disbelief as the Star Princess continued its course and disappeared over the horizon.

It was another 12 days before , from Panama, was rescued near the Galapagos islands, more than 600 miles from their home port of Rio Hato, by which time Fernando Osorio, 16, and Elvis Oropeza Betancourt, 31, had both died.

Mr Vazquez said he pushed their bodies overboard and was only saved himself by a sudden rainstorm that allowed him to fill some containers with water.

According to Mr Vazquez’s lawyer Edna Ramos, the British captain of the Star Princess, Edward Perrin, broke the terms of a United Nations convention that requires a master “to render assistance to any person found at sea in danger of being lost.”

She said: “The negligence has to do with the omission of giving assistance in what was a grave situation, and when the fishermen were facing imminent death.”

Ms Ramos said she filed the lawsuit in state court in Florida, where the Carnival Corporation, the parent company of Princess Cruises, has its US headquarters. Carnival also owns Costa Cruises, whose Costa Concordia run aground off Italy in January with the loss of 32 lives.

Mr Vazquez, who recently lost his job as a hotel gardener, said he and his partners were trying to make some money from an overnight fishing trip and were heading home on 25 February when their motor failed. They had only one day’s food and five gallons of water, which quickly disappeared.

He said the starving men caught a turtle at one stage but put it back because they did not think they could eat it.

Princess launched its own investigation last month and blamed “a breakdown in communication” on board.

In a statement that has since been removed from its website, the company said: “Understandably, Captain Perrin is devastated that he is being accused of knowingly turning his back on people in distress. Had the captain received this information, he would have had the opportunity to respond.”

The statement said Princess was aware of its obligations under international law and that the Star Princess had been involved in more than 30 rescues at sea in the previous decade.

But several passengers, some of whom are named in the lawsuit, contradict Princess’s insistence that senior officers were not informed.

One, Judy Meredith of Oregon, said that she and other bird watchers were on deck with their binoculars when they spotted the three-metre fishing boat, the Fifty Cents, drifting about a mile away with a man aboard waving something dark.

“We watched him for a bit and thought, ‘This guy’s in distress. He’s trying to get our attention and he doesn’t have a motor on his boat’,” she said.

Ms Meredith said she tried to find a crew member to report it to and found one of the ship’s sales staff.

“He called the bridge and I sort of talked through the story and I was trying to have a sense or urgency in my voice and tell them that the boat was in distress,” she said.

When she called Princess after the cruise to find out what happened, she said she was told that the captain altered the ship’s course to avoid a small fishing fleet and that the fishermen were waving their shirts to thank him.

“They tried everything they could to signal us, and our boat went by,” Ms Meredith said.